Year 2, Day 181: More Friends!

First of all, some choices need to be made.  My phone pictures are no longer syncing with the iCloud and my computer is full.  So, no more unpacking until I fix that.  Plus those silly 2013 Indiana State Taxes, blech.  Which is good because I physically can't do much right now.  I've made bad choices all week in food and sleep patterns.  I am trying to eat up the non plan items before I start the new Whole 30 plan on Saturday.  Bad idea.  Now I have a sugar withdrawal headache, and achy legs, on top of the ear ache.....

Anyway, I was telling Justin that he made several choices today that interfered with his reading of the "Lord of the Rings."  When another family with two girls right around Keturah's age asked if she could go to the library with them, they also invited Justin because they had an extra seat in the car.  He said yes.  To a van full of girls.  Anyway....Then he stayed with them through lunch until 1:30pm.  He finally came home and then a friend came by at 3 and he went out to play with him.  Then I called for chores to be done before and after supper and no more friend time.  Abishai was stir crazy, I was trying to clean up and finish up some projects I had started today and I needed Justin's help to watch the toddler. So, choices.  But they were fun choices, too.

Keturah had a great day with her new friends, but seemed very tired and edgy when she came home.  I've got to have them tell all their new friends that sometimes they just don't want to play.  They can use me as a bad guy if they need to.  I like that they have friends and that keeps them relatively free of screen time, but at the same time, they need their downtime.  And Abishai misses his siblings, too.  Keturah is grounded from the neighborhood kids until Monday, but I did make an exception today only because we hadn't spent time with this family yet.  They are homeschoolers, too, and the mom warned me about some of the other kids in the neighborhood.  So, it worked out well.  They are going away for the weekend anyway, so it will be easier to keep the punishment until Monday.   Speaking of Keturah, (my sisters would want to know this), I was pleasantly surprised to find that yes indeed she did keep our Barbies and most of our stuff separate from her own collection.  I don't know why it's so important to me, and I'm sure my sisters don't care that much, but my mom did make a lot of the clothes and I have many happy memories of our collections.  I was able to then organize it and put it into a big wardrobe brown box (yes, I know, it's brown, blech), and it will go into the closet again and be taken out only once in a while.  Now Keturah can concentrate on the small and medium sized brown boxes in her room that I want on the bookshelf or put in a fabric cube, etc.  So, her room is nearly there, except the paint.  She even made a list of what she needs to do next to organize everything.  She's a natural organizer!  And yet, she loves to make big messes like an artist, too.

The boys on the other hand, need shelving before I can finish most of their room.  So, that's on hold until Beniah gets back next week from CIY.  There are brown boxes in our room, which again, I need some kind of other storage container like a cube bookshelf so I can empty those boxes.  I'll try to purge but it's hard.  I did put away one other box of books and purged two of those books so far.  And I restretched the fencing outside to make a some kind of barrier for Socks.  It won't hold him if he really wants to take off, but now it won't be super easy either.  Socks did chase down two rabbits today and then went back to sniff at the place they had come from.  Sorry, bunnies, the yard is no longer safe for you.

Oh, and Benaiah and the team were 11th place out of 46 teams total.  The champions were from our region though, Mt. Pleasant Christian Church!  And they are near perfect, so it's no surprise.  Benaiah says he's exhausted, which, yeah, mentally exhausted, I get it.  But, he has 9 hrs in the car tomorrow, then needs to get a haircut, do laundry, and repack for CIY, which leaves on Monday at 7 am. Fun stuff!  So, get some rest, buddy, because you'll need it for next week.  And don't forget that Dad and Grandpa have been there all week, too, and Grandpa has had extra meetings and his day job to worry about.  And I've been just putting one foot in front of the other trying to survive the week, too.  Welcome to adulthood, son.

11th place!  Benaiah and the entourage of Henrys.  They all look super nice, too!

Last minute advice.  They had to play the game at 8:30 am.  Ouch.

"Hi, Ice Cream!" "No, Daddy, I don't want to talk to you right now.  Although, he wistfully looked down the drive and whined, "Daddy home?"  Aww....

Makeshift fence.  I'm going to get Jared to take a turn at it this week.

Playtime with Mommy.  Pen the Pig, a Howell classical.  Oink!

Abishai and I were stacking the pigs to the game and he kept undoing part of the tower so he could match up the one in his hand with the same color piggies in the stack.  I made sure to put this stack into the box carefully so it wouldn't upset him.

Laundry basket stir crazy before nap monster.

Justin was watching the YouTube channel called "Dude Perfect" which is about 5 guys who do cool stunts with all kinds of stuff.  I told Justin that it's all about physics and they must have had 100 practice runs before the trick shot worked.  So, Justin, with my encouragement, tried his own basketball trick shot. And he did it on the 6th try!  Abishai wanted to do it, too!

Last game for our team!

The homemade popsicles are yummy for breakfast!

Ah, memories of having juice popsicles in our fridge growing up.  We had to tear off the paper cup in order to eat it though.

 Spoilers: bug alert! If you don't like bugs, then scroll down a bit.

I was putting away the trash cans and found this perfectly intact "skin" of some kind of creature.  Now I'm thinking it was the huge nasty wasp that ended up in our sunroom that we killed with great effort.  But how cool to see it intact that like!  I was able to shwo it to Justin at least.  He didn't know what metamorphosis was.  Whoops! I failed that part of the science curriculum.  So he learned it today.

From larvae to nymph to adult.  Crazy!

Uh oh, we didn't dig down far enough yet.  The weeds are growing again.

Brown boxes are good for something, right?

Trick shot!

"Flip!" Except when he knew I was taking a picture.  Stir crazy baby.  He needs his Daddy home to wrestle him, that's for sure.  He did settle down fr some light reading before bed.  Then I told him that we were going to see tractors tomorrow (touch a truck) and he wanted to go right then.  Thankfully, he seemed to understand he needed to sleep first and away he went to bed.  Yeah!

It's supposed to pour rain all day tomorrow, so we'll see how touch a truck goes.  Sigh.  I've been looking forward to this for so long.  There's one in September we could maybe go to as well.  We'll see!